Seventeen per cent of scientists in study claim to be evangelicals

Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and her colleagues at Rice University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reported results from the largest study of American views on science and religion at the association’s annual conference in Chicago on Sunday, February 16. More than 10,000 people, including 574 self-identified as scientists, responded to the 75-question survey. Among the scientists, 17 percent said the term “evangelical” describes them “somewhat” or “very well,” compared to 23 percent of all respondents.

One factor may be that evangelicals are more likely to actively steer their children toward the ministry than are other Protestant Christians, reducing the numbers available for the sciences. Mainline Protestants, for example, were only slightly less likely than the average (24.9%) to be scientists. Jews were twice as likely and Mormons were about even.

Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs were nearly three times as likely to be scientists, but that may well reflect, among other things, current immigration patterns.

Interestingly,

In addition to religious identity, the new survey focused on perceptions people have about science and religion. About the same number of people in the general public perceive hostility by religious people toward science as perceive hostility by scientists toward religion—about 1 in 5. But among evangelical scientists, a strong majority (57 percent) perceive hostility from scientists toward religion, which may suggest Christians in scientific fields have negative experiences with fellow scientists in the workplace regarding their faith.

Maybe, instead of being schooled in turning the other cheek, they should be schooled in “Shut up, atheist blowhard! Nobody asked you.” Or would that just make the workplace too contentious? 😉

2 Responses to Seventeen per cent of scientists in study claim to be evangelicals

This is great news. It might interest people to know the deceptive way in which the public was misled to believe a majority of scientists were atheists.

More Scientists Believe In God Than Atheists Want (You) to Think
Excerpt: In the late 90s atheists began making the argument that less than a majority of scientists believe in God. In addition to this they argued that National Academy of Sciences had only about 5% members who believed in God. All of this was due to the publication of a 1998 an article “Leading Scientists Still reject God.” In that article got hold of a survey done in 1914 by a guy named James Henry Luba and Nature Magazine noticed that the stats had not changed. So the conclusion that scientists are such great priests of knowledge, if they don’t bleieve in God there must not be one.

Research on this topic began with the eminent US psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 “greater” scientists within his sample [1]. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively [2].

In 1996, we repeated Leuba’s 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature [3]. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba’s 1914 survey to gauge belief among “greater” scientists, and find the rate of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents. (Nature,ibid)

Atheists made the most of this since Luba echoed the fallacious conclusions they themselves drew from the data. “Leuba attributed the higher level of disbelief and doubt among “greater” scientists to their “superior knowledge, understanding, and experience” (ibid). Of course this is fallacious, scientists don’t have any special knowledge that would tell them God doesn’t exist, or that he does. It was Nature that polled the NAS. One of the things that I argued at the time was that the questions were rigged to slant the discussion toward the fundamentalist concept of God portrayed in a literal understanding of the Bible. I argued that if you factored in a more liberal concept of God belief among scientists would go way up.,,,
There are now several studies or surveys that reflect this assumption and anew set of findings changes the ball game. Several studies (listed on site):,,,http://christiancadre.blogspot.....-than.html

Of course, since the naturalistic worldview leads to the epistemological failure of science itself, then no scientist should be an atheist!

A few notes to that effect:

Design Thinking Is Hardwired in the Human Brain. How Come? – October 17, 2012
Excerpt: “Even Professional Scientists Are Compelled to See Purpose in Nature, Psychologists Find.” The article describes a test by Boston University’s psychology department, in which researchers found that “despite years of scientific training, even professional chemists, geologists, and physicists from major universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale cannot escape a deep-seated belief that natural phenomena exist for a purpose” ,,,
Most interesting, though, are the questions begged by this research. One is whether it is even possible to purge teleology from explanation.http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....65381.html

Scientific Peer Review is in Trouble: From Medical Science to Darwinism – Mike Keas – October 10, 2012
Excerpt: Survival is all that matters on evolutionary naturalism. Our evolving brains are more likely to give us useful fictions that promote survival rather than the truth about reality. Thus evolutionary naturalism undermines all rationality (including confidence in science itself). Renown philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued against naturalism in this way (summary of that argument is linked on the site:).
Or, if your short on time and patience to grasp Plantinga’s nuanced argument, see if you can digest this thought from evolutionary cognitive psychologist Steve Pinker, who baldly states:
“Our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth; sometimes the truth is adaptive, sometimes it is not.”
Steven Pinker, evolutionary cognitive psychologist, How the Mind Works (W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 305.http://blogs.christianpost.com.....ism-12421/

Physicalism and Reason – May 2013
Summary: So we find ourselves affirming two contradictory propositions:
1. Everything is governed by cause-and-effect.
2. Our brains can process and be changed by ground-consequent logical relationships.
To achieve consistency, we must either deny that everything is governed by cause-and-effect, and open our worldviews to something beyond physicalism, or we must deny that our brains are influenced by ground-consequence reasoning, and abandon the idea that we are rational creatures.
Ask yourself: are humans like falling dominoes, entirely subject to natural law, or may we stand up and walk in the direction that reason shows us?http://www.reasonsforgod.org/2.....nd-reason/

“Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.”
– Kurt Gödel

An Interview with David Berlinski – Jonathan Witt
Berlinski: There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time ….
Interviewer:… Come again(?) …
Berlinski: No need to come again: I got to where I was going the first time. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces. But these are precisely the claims that theologians have always made as well – that human beings are capable by an exercise of their devotional abilities to come to some understanding of the deity; and the deity, although beyond space and time, is capable of interacting with material objects.http://tofspot.blogspot.com/20.....-here.html

These numbers seem funny. Ministry would be irrelevant in affecting evangelicals. it seems fine. Remember identity is the big point. Blacks and southerners would call themselves Evangelical and surely are far below the smarter professions here. Yes third world immigration is bringing in upper classes of these foreigners to North americas top professions. Surely a injustice and to be stopped. Generally there is interference with the true people of the nations here but unnatural identity problems.
Its bigger then creationism and God beliefs.